Latest Posts by sentimentalrobots - Page 7

Nobody is making anyone go into scriptwriting. No one is born in a Netflix company town where their dad takes them into the script mines at age 12. Fuck writers who want to get paid more than once for the same job. They should only get residuals AFTER all the people who do REAL WORK, like construction, grips, costume, makeup & animators etc. Most of them are much better at their jobs than writers especially for streaming services, and they are what screenwriters can lean on & novelists can't.

People need to realize that the unions for white collar people like WGA or SIEU or NEA (public sector unions are why cops who kill the people they were supposed to serve & protect remain employed get pensions) is not the AFL-CIO or any other historical union fighting for the lives of the people who built the country's industry and made it run, any more than the NRA are the Minutemen of 1775 New England.

First, go fuck yourself, you fucking scab. No, seriously - you don't come to my blog and spout off about what workers deserve unions and decent pay and what ones don't, like it's your fucking decision. The intellectual labor that writers perform is just as real as any other work done on a film set - "all who labor by hand or brain" is the inherent logic of industrial unionism for a reason.

Second, writers aren't asking to get paid more than once: residuals are deferred pay, you absolute moron. In Hollywood, whether it's writers or actors or voice talent or whatever, you get a small fraction up front - it's usually an ok check, depending on the union's day rates and so forth, but you can't make a living off stitching these together - and then most of your pay comes from monthly royalty checks that provide you with the income you need to live off when you're between jobs.

The problem is that, historically in Hollywood, residuals have been structured with a very long "tail" - the payments start out relatively low and then get more generous over time as the show has more seasons and (presumably) goes into syndication. This doesn't work with streaming's new business model, where increasingly shows are getting 2-3 seasons max and streaming services have become increasingly quick to not just cancel shows but yank them off their servers in order to avoid paying residuals.

So what WGA writers are fighting for is a system that ensures writers (but also actors and other creative workers, because the unions pattern bargain) get a fair share of the show's revenue, even if the show is only given 2-3 seasons.

Third, the U.S labor movement would not exist today if it wasn't for white collar workers and public sector workers. About half of the U.S labor movement - 7 million workers - is public sector, and those workers are overwhelmingly women of color, mostly working as either teachers or postal workers. Likewise, about half the U.S labor movement is made up of white collar workers, and we're graduate students and adjuncts and lab researchers, teachers and social workers, administrators and IT departments.

I'm both public sector and white collar, and I'm a member of an NEA union. I'm an adjunct professor who earns $6,000 a course and it's my job to get working adults with jobs and families who've never gone to college or who've been out of higher ed for a decade to graduate with a bachelor's or a master's. If you don't think that's real work, you're free to research and write all the lectures and powerpoints, deliver those in an entertaining and educational fashion, answer a flood of questions from students who need help navigating academia, and then grade all the midterms and finals and research papers.

TW: animal death / injury / death For grandma, who loved pigeons, and for grandpa, who did not but wanted her to be happy. Please hear me out <3 WEBTOON

i fucking love humanity and space. thinking abt.. thinking about the perseverence rover, lovingly nicknamed "percy" and the family portrait it has on it of the former rovers sent to mars 😭

how we sent an ounce of clyde tombaugh's ashes aboard the new horizons space probe so he could visit the "planet" he discovered.

the pioneer plaques

AND the golden record on the voyagers

us screaming out to space hoping desperately to not be alone, that we are HERE HERE WE ARE THIS IS WHAT WE LOOK LIKE.

astronauts turning into artists after their time in space,,, ooughghg

I think people on EBT should be allowed to eat at a five star restaurant for completely free once a month minimum and I'm not joking. It should be a human right to have the roses not just the bread.

I've finally finished this one! An untidy, yet cosy fantasy/sci-fi bookshop, with a stack of old paperbacks on the counter.

Prints available here

#QuietQuitting sounds like capitalists complaining about their waning exploitation.

The facts for March 20, 2023

Just an FYI for those in the US with insurance issues

@powerburial

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining

because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

and then

we built robots?

and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone

but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

and they told us to tell you hello.

despite everything …. I’m grateful I got a chance to be alive… to experience love and good food and sunsets. isn’t that the point of it all really

"...I mean the wages of a DECENT LIVING"

Reblog if you had a Tumblr for 5+ years

Harvest mouse on a dandelion by Dean Mason.

scientists in media: we have engineered a brand-new sentient lifeform in our lab but we treat it like an object with cold detachment and refer to as Specimen 1-A and subject it to horrible tests without remorse

scientists in reality: we built two robots that will leave Earth and never return and their names are Percy and Ginny and we gave Percy a family portrait of all our other Mars robots to take along with it and when the anniversary of its landing comes around we’re working on teaching it to sing itself “happy birthday” like we did for the other robot and–

From @hedgehog_azuki: “He has a very sensitive nose 😊” #cutepetclub [source: https://instagr.am/p/COaqUxhra_U/ ]

A 12 million year old crab was hiding in this rock